Flare
by Punctuator
Summary: The Outside of Your Skin Trilogy: Part Two. Just over a year into their mission, the crew of the Icarus II battens the hatches against a force deadly and invisible. Rated for salty language, a smattering of innuendo and gore, and one bad bacon joke.
1. Chapter 1

**FLARE**

Some days they staged contests. Nothing silly, nothing dangerous. Just things to jolt the dust from the same, same, sameness. Today's contest, on this the four hundredth and sixth day of their journey to the sun's nearer side, was to see who could first complete his or her maintenance checklist. The prize was an extra fifteen minutes in the comms room. The time was at a premium: they'd been hitting windows of silence in the last few weeks, stretches during which their transmitters were failing to launch clear messages. Harvey had found a pattern to the muddled periods but was having trouble, help from home notwithstanding, diagnosing the problem; for now he and the others had settled for timing their messages for the clearest sending periods. Like the one coming in twelve minutes.

Whitby took the prize. Mace had edged her, until Kaneda, double-checking Mace's maintenance list-- they took turns cross-checking each other-- had found one tiny shorted-dark lightbulb in a suit closet, the bulbs tending to take a beating from the suits' heavy, clumsy bulk, and announced that the extra comms time was now Whitby's.

For some reason, it irked Mace. The contest over, he was heading for the galley and a cup of coffee, and Corazon was with him, and Whitby was ahead of them, she and Capa, heading toward Comms, and it was itching under his skin like a hot powdering of fiberglass insulation.

Corazon, who could read his moods, said, simply: "Mace."

She'd seen him looking after Whitby, the long bones of their substitute pilot in gray t-shirt, multi-pocketed trousers, the boots she had continued to wear long after the rest of them had informalized to sneakers or sandals. Not a look of undressing, though Whitby, despite tending toward hardness, wasn't unattractive: more a sizing-up. She and Capa were talking quietly as they walked, and Whitby had just managed to spark a smile from their generally inexpressive young physicist, and Mace was openly scowling now--

"You checked his list, Corrie, right?" he was saying. "How'd you even understand what to look for--?"

"Look, all I know is all his lights were on." Corazon smiled wryly. She glanced over at him. "And someone was home, too."

"What--?"

They were at the galley. Corazon ruffled his hair. "Ease up, kiddo. You'll get your turn."

"Sure." Mace nearly smiled back. Then, impulsively, he turned back to the corridor and called sharply after Whitby: "Still trying for 'Mother of the Year,' huh?"

Whitby stopped. Capa took three more steps, then stopped, too. Sometimes social realities took a moment to register with him. He looked from Whitby back to Mace even as Whitby turned and, more than that, stalked back to Mace, right up to him, and countered with that old classic (which would have been so even in _Brainiac's Guide to Detached Living_): "What did you say?"

"_Nice,_ Mace--" Corazon muttered.

"Shut up, Corrie." Mace focused on Whitby. "Got something to say, Pilot Whitby?"

What he'd hated about her getting the extra comms time-- or at least even now he was trying to persuade himself of it-- was what she wanted it for: she had a kid back home, a boy named Pete, something like seven or eight years old, and it was the little shit's first communion or something like that, people like Whitby still believing in that crap and, worse, having to infect their kids with it, too, even from fifty million miles away, and she wanted to send him an extra message ("Welcome to the cult, honey!", or some damn thing)-- and then, even as Mace realized just how irrational and stupid he was being, Whitby was there, four or five feet away--

"I think you're out of line, Lieutenant," she said quietly.

To which he replied, before he could stop himself: "What? Didn't catch that."

"She's right; you are--" Capa was with them now, too. "Mace, you're wasting time. Whitby needs to get to the--"

"Up yours, Brainiac. Bitch has something to say; let her talk."

Whitby went pale. "Alright, that does it--"

She took a step toward Mace. Corazon reached for him as he tensed; he shrugged away from her. Then Capa got between him and Whitby--

"Whitby, don't. Mace, come on--"

Adrenaline burned Mace's veins; the words seemed to say themselves: "You're sticking up for her? Like those flygirls, don'tcha, Brainiac?" He smirked at Capa. "What-- you banging _her_ now--?"

Capa's eyes flashed. He shoved Mace-- the little bastard had plenty of wiry tough push in him-- and Mace swung back a fist-- and then Corazon was grabbing for him while Whitby, shock breaking through the anger on her face, was grabbing Capa, and then a man's voice barked: "Mace! Capa!"

The four of them froze. Harvey was approaching from the direction of the comms center. Whitby and Corazon stepped back; he focused on Mace and Capa.

"Seam duty. Both of you. Be prepped in forty-five minutes."


	2. Chapter 2

If those aboard the _Icarus II_ had had a guide to handling immature behavior, one would have found "seam duty" under the heading "_Do we need to separate you two?_"

At this point, the two in need of separation were together at the suit locker outside the ship's main airlock. Mace tugged hard at a storage harness, stepped aside as the golden armored body rumbled clear. Two tiny green lights on the chest plate: two full tanks of air. Locker to the right: Mace took out a pressure vest, zipped and buckled himself into it while Capa popped the seals on the suit.

"I could go, Mace," he said.

Mace glanced over, saw Capa looking at the suit, saw the quiet fear in the younger man's face. Brainiac hated going outside, and that was a fact. "Don't be stupid, man. You're the one who's indispensable to the mission. I'm just a dumb tool." He looked toward the ceiling cam. "Right, Whitby?"

_Your phrasing, not mine, Mace._

"Bitch," he muttered.

From the wall speaker came the voice of _Icarus_: _Say again, Mace?_

"Nothing. Disregard, _Icarus_."

_Yes, Mace._

_No, really, Mace_. Whitby's voice, as sweetly neutral as that of the ship. _Say again. Please_.

Harvey's voice, now on the feed, irritated: _Always room for one more on that detail, Whitby_.

_My apologies, Mr. Harvey_.

Mace grunted, shrugging into the suit, shifting the helmet into place. Capa threw the locks, and Mace waited through the dogpitch whistling as the suit's seals seated and its systems came fully on line.

_Grid visible, Mace?_ Whitby asked.

"Yes, Pilot," Mace replied, watching the schematic of the ship's hull fill the air before his eyes. He didn't know why he called her that: it sounded impersonal, somehow insulting, without re-crossing the line to "bitch."

Thinking too much into it: if Whitby heard his contempt, her voice didn't reflect it. She spoke again, on the feed, evenly: _Tools in hand, Capa?_

_Yes, Whitby._

_Go to it, boys. I'll be keeping an eye on you._

Mace entered the airlock. As the inner door closed, he thought of giving Capa a thumb's up. Then he thought the idea stupid. He checked the belt on his toolkit and his tether line; he faced the outer door and waited for the vacuum, the palpable blackness outside.

* * *

Seam duty. Checking key points in the ship's hull for structural integrity, a painstaking, awkward process that involved one person inside, a second person immediately across the bulkhead outside, making and comparing measurements with digital scanning micrometers. Anything falling outside spec on the measurements received spotwelding, handipatch, or a segment of interior or exterior tiling. The ship couldn't scan herself as thoroughly as two humans with handheld equipment could: _Icarus_ could "see" herself structurally only where her makers had installed sensors. And it was logical in more ways than one for Capa to be the one who stayed inside: not only did it make no sense for him to risk himself unnecessarily, but he was much more suited than Mace, with his lean, wiry frame, to weaseling his way into tight corners of the ship. He could even go under the floor plating if need be.

And really, Mace didn't mind going outside. He found it calming, a chance truly to be alone. He re-ran the scene outside the galley with Whitby and Capa, saw his fault, resolved to apologize: a simple process of repair, methodical. Then, as he made his way along the dirty white tiling of the hull to the first checkpoint, he found himself comparing Whitby to Cassie. Whatever Cassie's reasons for leaving had been, he wasn't able to blame her; further, they had in Whitby a fine pilot. Still--

"Do you ever think of her?"

He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until Capa's voice said over the feed: _Think of who, Mace?_

"Cassie."

_Yes_.

"Miss her?"

_Yes. But I'm glad she's not here._

"Me, too."

_Would've been... awkward._

"Yeah."

_Though I can't help but-- I suppose it's only natural: after all, she was my first--_

"Your first what?"

A pause. _Nothing, Mace. Forget it._

"You said it. Your first what...? Oh, no. Oh, no no no. Don't tell me she was your first--"

_Yeah_.

"You're kidding. You are fucking kidding me."

_No_.

"You're telling me-- Capa, come on: you're a good-looking-- I mean, you're not exactly an ugly guy. What the hell were you doing all those years?"

_Research. Science. I just never-- It never really seemed like a priority--_

"Did she know? Cassie. Did she--"

_I think-- I think she had a pretty good idea._

* * *

On the flight deck, Trey stared at a display near Navs. "My God--"

He wasn't tuned in to the discussion outside; if asked, he wouldn't have considered himself privy to anything resembling current revelations or potentially embarrassing confessions: he was watching the readings from the ship's external sensors, and he was seeing something frightening. Terrifying, even. "Captain--"

Kaneda rose from the co-pilot's chair, joined Trey at Navs. "What is it, Trey?"

"Spike in radiation across the board, and it's rising, sir." Trey was fighting to keep his voice steady. He was nearly succeeding. "I think it's the leading edge of a flare."

Asked Kaneda, calmly: "Time to peak intensity?"

"Five minutes. Maybe six."

Kaneda turned toward Comms: "Mr. Harvey, all channels: all hands prep for radiation lockdown. This is not a drill."

"Yes, sir."

They all went into action, Whitby, Kaneda, the others inside, offlining the ship's systems, activating spot-shielding. Searle checked in from Medical; Corazon responded from the Oxygen Garden, where they'd be sheltering once the _Icarus's_ basic computer systems were masked. The ship itself, her metal and plastic and glass, were built to withstand the radiation of a solar flare; flesh and blood and bone, plant matter, were not: the effect on an exposed human body would be akin to extremely high-wattage microwaving. Trey was the first to finish his portion of the systems-wrapping; Kaneda sent him to help Corazon check the shielding in the Oxygen Garden.

From Comms, Harvey said: "I can't raise Capa or Mace."

"Did they hear the warning?" Whitby asked.

"I don't know."

Kaneda asked Whitby: "What was their last reported position?"

"Moving on to section sixteen."

"I will get Capa." Kaneda headed for the door. "Finish shielding your station and get clear, Mr. Harvey."

"Yes, sir."

"What about Mace?" Whitby asked. "Sir--"

Kaneda paused at the doorway. "He heard."

"We don't know that--" Harvey began.

"You have less than four minutes to get to the shelter, Mr. Harvey." Kaneda glanced from him to Whitby. "You, too, Loinnir. Do not be late."

* * *

Static, then silence, on the feed. Capa, wedged tightly into an unlit corner, his torso twisted between a support beam and the floor plating as he wrangled a piece of patching, didn't immediately notice. Then he got to thinking things unrelated to arguments or patching or physics, and he felt his cheeks and ears go hot there in the dark, and he said:

"Mace-- I was kidding. About Cassie being-- umm. You know I was kidding, right--?"

Silence. Another brief burst of static. Capa tapped the earpiece of his headset.

"Mace? Whitby, can you raise Mace?"

Nothing.

"_Icarus,_ test feed on channel three."

Nothing.

He could feel his heart beating. "_Icarus,_ respond--"

"Capa--!" Kaneda's voice, sharp, behind him. Capa untwisted himself, brought himself to a crouch, straightened. Before he could ask, Kaneda was gesturing for him, beckoning, a universal _hurry_: "Flare approaching. We need to get to the Oxygen Garden _now_."


	3. Chapter 3

Mace was professional military, less naive than Capa, more attuned to his surroundings. When the feed went dead, he heard the silence, knew something was wrong, and hauled himself back down the hull of the _Icarus_. A minute and a half later, standing in the airlock as it repressurized, he heard through his helmet the automated warning-- a siren that cried, wordlessly, _Lethal radiation_-- and he knew that he was dead.

Then the inner door opened, and Whitby was there.

* * *

"Ninety seconds," said Trey.

They were all there but two: Trey, Capa, Harvey, Corazon, Searle, Kaneda, there in the Oxygen Garden, waiting for Whitby, edging toward despair for Mace.

"Eighty-five."

Harvey had been the last to see her. "She was heading for the airlock," he said.

A frown flickered across Kaneda's face as he looked out into the empty corridor. "Damn it."

* * *

She was a wreck diver when she wasn't in the air or beyond it; she was wise in the ways of suits heavy and awkward. Whitby had Mace's helmet off in seconds, heaving it clear with a grunt and letting it fall, hard, to the deck; she unclasped his gloves and pulled them away. But then she glanced at her wrist watch as Mace commenced clawing at the clamps holding his chest plate, and she said: "There's no time. Come on."

She grabbed him hard by his suited arm and pulled as Mace stepped-- _thudded_, more accurately-- clear of the airlock. She hauled him as he shuffled, stumbled in his thick weighted boots. There was a two-person emergency shelter just over twenty meters away.

"How long--?" he panted.

"Thirty-five seconds."

"We won't make it."

"Come on--"

"No. Leave me. Go."

She pulled him along. "You're weak."

"Fuck you--" Mace growled.

"Had dive gear weighed more'n these suits."

But he was right. She stopped as he stopped, both of them gasping; she looked around desperately--

A steel door, maybe three meters ahead, on the right. Whitby tugged it open, got a faceful of icy air. A food locker, set in the wall. A coffin freezer, stood upright, largely emptied since their trip began. She began pulling from it its remaining contents, jerked its shelves free, tossed them, clattering, to the deck. She turned, panting, to Mace.

"Get in."

"You're kidding."

"It's shielded, isn't it? Shielded for the meat."

"We both won't fit."

"No, we won't. Get in there, Mace."

"Whitby--"

"You can fly as well as I can. I'm not the mechanic you are. Go on, now."

Not just his aching lungs, his pounding heart: something else sang a song of agony in his chest. Mace backed into the locker. Whitby smiled for him, reached for the door--

_She had to smile, didn't she--?_

Like she'd smile for her kid, like she'd smile for someone she loved--

"God damn it," Mace whispered.

As quickly as anyone had ever moved in one of those ridiculous suits, Mace moved then. He grabbed Whitby by the torso, just under her arms, and shoved her bodily into the freezer. He shoved himself in after her and slammed the door.

* * *

Five seconds earlier, Trey checked his watch. "Ten seconds."

"Seal the doors, Mr. Harvey," Kaneda said.


	4. Chapter 4

High on the list of sounds the human torso should not make one would certainly find the _deep wet crunch_. As Mace threw his suited self into the meat locker, as the door thumped shut and the air went black, Whitby with the right side of her chest caught the brunt of his armored back. The suit crushed her against the freezer's back wall, and from Whitby's torso came that most ill-advised sound. From Whitby's lips came a bark of shock and pain; a moment after that came a high, harsh, wheezing cough-- and something warm and wet spattered the back of Mace's neck.

"Fuck--" he breathed. Not just at the cough or the spattering: at all of it. He waited for a horrible breathless second for the cooking to begin: this couldn't possibly work, _shielding-for-the-meat-my-ass_, the radiation was buzzing and crackling through the door-- but _silently,_ yes-- worming right into their organs, and they were already dying--

But they weren't. His breathing was steadying; his heartbeat was slowing. He stared at the pitch blackness, incredulous.

Then Whitby coughed again, as hard or harder. "Oh, God--" she wheezed. "Mace--"

"Whitby, what--?" He didn't need to ask; he knew: he was crushing her. _Jesus_.

"Can you-- move? At all?"

"No."

"Shit." Her voice was a harsh, whistling whisper. "Think-- God, think I punctured a lung. Having trouble breathing."

"Don't talk, then. Shhh."

He listened while she tried to calm her breathing, the air in her sounding painful and wet. It was cold in the locker. He could feel it creeping beneath the collar of his suit, chilling the sweat between his shoulder blades, on his forehead. Whitby was wearing a t-shirt: she'd freeze in here. What was more--

"We won't have enough air," he said.

The slightest increase in pressure against his right shoulder blade. He could barely feel it through the suit: she was resting her head against him.

"Can you move your arms?" she asked.

Mace tried again to move, managed only to wedge himself tighter against the rigid cold walls. "No."

"Think I can move my left--"

"Bleed the suit?"

"Yeah. Here--" Whitby's breath caught as she twisted her left arm in and beneath Mace's, her skin catching on the rough outerweave of the suit. He couldn't feel her fingers on the frontplate. But a moment later he heard a hissing.

"Got it," she gasped.

_Don't waste it,_ Mace thought, closing his eyes. Slow in, slow out. But he had something to say. Now, before his three-quarters tank proved unequal to the time before them.

"Whitby, I want to apologize."

"No. Not now."

"Loinnir--"

"Don't waste the air."

"Okay."

Quiet. Both of them. Then he heard a hitching in her breathing, in addition to the wheezing: she was shivering. Cold, certainly. Shock, almost definitely.

"Whitby."

"Yeah, Mace."

"Don't fall asleep."

"Don't worry." She coughed or chuckled: he couldn't be sure which. "Pain'll keep me awake."

* * *

But it didn't.

* * *

She drifted.

* * *

"Mum--!"

Pete's voice, outside the shack where she kept her dive gear. _And, Jesus, wasn't it cold in here today--?_ Loinnir Whitby threw a glare at the space heater before she turned to see him, her little man, her best boy, shouldering through the door, with his coat, without his cap, his cheeks rosy from running down the rocky beach in the perpetually nippy air.

She parked the faulty regulator on the cluttered, grease-dark landscape of her workbench, reached for a rag, wiped her hands. "What is it, Pete?"

"The phone. Uncle Richie says t' tell you it's them arseholes from Project Dickerus."

She didn't bother chastising him for the words. You never shot the messenger, especially when the message was from Richie, more especially still when the bearer was this one. "Sure. Be right there."

No phone in the shack, and the one in the house was near-on twenty years out of date. No picture-phones for Richard Whitby and family: what was the fun in it, he wanted to know, if the person you were talking to could see you picking your nose, digging in your knickers, flipping 'em the bird?

So Whitby picked up the phone and said to the invisible caller one whole ocean and half a continent away from where she stood in Scotland: "Whitby here."

"Loinnir? Hi. Daniel Monroe."

* * *

Odd she should have known what he was going to say. Or maybe not: why else would Monroe have been calling?

_(God, it was cold in the house today, too.)_

A shiver ran through her as she set down the handset. "They want me to fly the _Icarus II_," she said, carefully.

Mary, Richie's wife, stood in the doorway to the kitchen, a look of mild perplexity on her weathered face. "What's happened to Cassidy?"

Whitby shrugged numbly. "I'm not exactly-- He didn't exactly say."

A frown ran in bits and pieces around Richard Whitby's face. Then he grinned incredulously: "That little filly's gone an' got herself knocked up!"

Whitby focused a glare full on him. "In front of the boy yet--!"

Peter, all the way out of his coat, asked his uncle: "What's 'knocked up'?"

"Your mum's the expert on that one." Richie winked at him. "You'll have t' ask her."

"Richie--!" Whitby snapped.

Pondered Mary: "If it is, who d' yeh think--"

"It's not--" Whitby began. "Would the two of you--"

"I'll tell you who it's not," Richie said. "That Capa fella. Y'ask me, he's a bit ell-eye-gee-aitch-tee in his ell-oh-ay-eff-ee-are-ess."

"Richie, for Christ's--"

Richie fixed her with his glittering eyes. "Front of the _boy,_ Annalee--"

"They want me to _fly it_, Richie. The mission."

Peter came close, looked up at her. "Where, Mum?"

"To the sun, Pete. All the way t' the sun."

More quietly, Richie asked: "What about McCloud?"

Jim McCloud, _Icarus II_'s first alternate pilot. "He's backed out," Whitby said. "Monroe says he wants to be with his family when--"

"When--"

Mary said to Pete: "Give me a hand with the dishes, Peter, would you?"

"Can I have a cookie?"

"Yes, you mercenary. C'mon."

Whitby waited until she and Richie were alone. "He wants to be with them when the food runs out, when the power runs out. When the rioting begins." Her eyes filled with tears. "He wants to be with them at the end."

Richie came over, put his hand on his shoulder. "It won't end. Not like that. You'll see to it, won't you, Annalee?"

She put her hand over his. "Aye, Richie, I will."

* * *

Still just as bloody cold, even worse, as though it were infesting her from the marrow on out, the day she turned out in her new kit, and Richie was the first to notice--

"The cheap bastards--!" He laughed, pointing at the embroidered patch on his sister's shoulder. She twisted her neck to see--

Capa. Trey. Corazon. Searle. Mace. Kaneda. Harvey.

And Cassidy.

Less than two months to launch. The stalwarts heading Project Icarus never bothered to change the signage.

* * *

On her last night on Earth, she slept with Peter, in his bed. She let him stay awake as long as he wanted, didn't shush him to sleep. He did sleep, though, finally. She snuggled behind him, slipped her arm across him, held him close, dozed. It was the last time she could recall being warm.

* * *

_God, it was cold._


	5. Chapter 5

What made it frightening was the quiet. You'd think that an external force awful enough to kill you would growl or thunder or roar like a storm. Not this killer. Not a wall of radiation rushing through the vacuum of deep space.

Harvey eyed the heavy gray shutters covering the greenhouse wall of the Oxygen Garden. "How long do you think it'll last?"

"Hard to say." Trey looked over from his spot near one of Corazon's workbenches, where he'd set up a portable radiation monitor between two muddy green trays of seedlings. "Maybe six hours. Could be less."

"Could be more," Corazon said bleakly. She looked at Kaneda. "Are they dead?"

He met her eyes reluctantly, said what she already knew: "We've had no word from the auxiliary shelters."

"Comms could be down," Harvey offered.

"Emergency comms were working this morning," Trey said. "I cross-checked your maintenance list, remember?"

"Yeah."

Capa sat at an angle away from the rest of them, watching the condensation dripping onto the wash station, his elbows on the dry edge of the steel tabletop, his right hand cupped over his left, his chin resting on his knuckles. "Mace would not have had time to reach an auxiliary shelter. And Whitby wouldn't leave him." He spoke unsentimentally. "That's just how she is."

"'Was,'" Trey corrected, quietly.

Harvey said, in Capa's direction: "It's a character flaw, you mean."

"That's not what I said."

"Right. Sure. She'd risk killing both herself and him--"

"Harvey." Corazon spoke softly, stingingly. He went silent. She continued: "We still don't know if they're--"

"Yeah, we do." Searle, seated on the turf near a splay of ferns, parked his forearms on his peaked knees and looked up at her flatly. "They've been dead for-- Trey, how long have we been in here?"

"Two hours, thirty-eight minutes."

"Two hours, thirty-five minutes, then. Would've taken about three minutes. Maybe a little longer for Mace, if he was still in the suit."

"Three minutes." Corazon stared at him. "For them to--"

"Eyes go first," Searle said. "Boil and burst. Then the lungs, the intestines, the stomach-- Internal organs, the brain: just cook. Cartilage liquefies. Then the marrow super-heats, and the weaker bones--"

Corazon cleared her throat. "Stop."

"Sorry."

Nothing but the sound of water dripping. The wall fans were still.

Searle shrugged. "I was only trying to explain--"

"It didn't help," Corazon said.

The six of them went quiet. Corazon seated herself on the ground, near a tangling patch of strawberries. Kaneda sat near her. They didn't acknowledge one another. Harvey slowly edged away from the shuttered windows.

"Hey--" Trey said.

He certainly didn't shout; still, Corazon jumped. Kaneda, starting in tandem with her, reached over, rested his hand gently on her shoulder.

"What is it, Trey?"

"Wait--" Trey's eyes were intent on the display of his field monitor. "Wait: it's--" He smiled slightly as he looked out at the rest of them. "Radiation's dropping off."

* * *

The oxygen wasn't the problem. The carbon dioxide was.

Each breath Mace took felt shallower than the one before: he found himself struggling to push the spent air from his lungs. He felt himself growing heavy in the suit; his chin was dropping toward his chest, and his chest was tightening.

Whitby was quiet. She had murmured for a time, softly, her voice nothing but a quavering whisper through her shivering, holding her half of a conversation with a person or persons months, maybe years, ago, millions of miles away. Now she was silent.

Slipping away.

Mace wasn't about to stop her. He could hear her breathing becoming easier: whatever pain was radiating from her crushed chest, she was no longer feeling it. That was good.

_Wherever you are, Loinnir, just stay there._

Mace smiled a slight, hypoxic smile. Then he traded the darkness around them for the darkness behind his eyelids.

* * *

Subconsciously, they'd expected wanton destruction. When the doors of the Oxygen Garden unsealed, Kaneda and the five with him looked out with something akin to suspicion at the unfallen ceiling of the corridor, the unbuckled floor, the walls standing firm against the vacuum. The bluish emergency lighting was still on, but it was steady and unflickering. No fire, no crackling of electrical shorts. Only--

"I smell bacon," Trey said.

The rest of them caught it a moment later: a faint, awful, acrid smell, organic and charred--

Harvey, the first one to realize what-- or who-- it had to be, nearly gagged. "Christ, Trey, show some respect."

"No, he's--" Searle edged past them into the corridor, sniffing. "Whatever we're smelling, it isn't human flesh."

* * *

Locating them didn't exactly take a genius, so perhaps Capa's arriving first at the scene was intellectual overkill. He grimaced at what he saw, not immediately identifying it: grisly lumps, fist-sized and smaller, splatters and tendrils, too, all in charcoal gray and black, all over the floor and stuck well up the walls. Pieces of plastic wrap, burst, shredded, carbonized. He stepped over a section of mesh-steel shelving lying loose on the deck and read off a charred label--

BEEF

There was a stainless steel door to his left. It was tall, and it was roughly the width of the loose section of shelving.

"Holy shit," Capa whispered. He navigated the field of flared meat, pulled the door open, stared. Then he shouted toward the airlock, toward Kaneda and Harvey and Trey: "They're here--!"


	6. Chapter 6

It took Harvey, Searle, and Kaneda to pry Mace out of the meat locker: his frosted suit came free with a grinding squeak. He was deeply disoriented and nearly unconscious; he very nearly fell on Corazon. Whitby, toppling after him, very nearly fell on Trey. Her chin, the chest of her t-shirt, the back of Mace's head: all were sticky with cold blood. Whitby's face was grayish-white.

"My God--" Capa helped Trey lower her to the deck; he knelt opposite Searle as the doctor reached for Whitby's throat. "Is she dead?"

Just as Searle's fingertips found her jugular, Whitby convulsed, coughed a spray of blood into Capa's face. Searle smiled at him wryly. "No." He looked up at the others. "Let's get these two to Medical."

* * *

Things weren't nearly as dire in the light of Medical as they had seemed in the cold blackness of the freezer. Whitby had two cracked ribs and a badly bruised lung and a case of hypothermia that her Scottish hide was too thick to regard as fatal. She got a bottle of pain pills and the next day's shift off. Mace, defrosted and re-oxygenated, got to spend seven hours checking for system shorts, diagnosing and fixing the electronics in his dropped helmet, and prowling the _Icarus_ looking for melted seals and grommets. Then he spent nearly another two trying to get the petrified meat off the deck and bulkheads outside the freezer, which he did alone, after Trey, the bastard, insisted he had to collate the data on the flare while it was still fresh and Capa, looking queasy, muttered a mouthful of technospeak and slunk off to baby his bomb.

So Mace wasn't in the best of moods when he swung by the Oxygen Garden. Corazon laughed at his grumbling: "So now you're the janitor, too."

"Big surprise, huh?" Mace looked out into the cool green of the fern stand. A chair was there, a blanket folded over the back, a reading pad on the seat. "Was Whitby here?"

"Yeah. You just missed her. Kaneda came for her about five minutes ago."

"Didn't sound good?"

"Nope."

"Maybe he could cut her some slack." Mace frowned. "No: what she did was stupid. Could've killed us both."

Corazon moved away, dropped to an easy squat in one of the garden patches. "You both might have died, you mean. There's a difference."

He hesitated; he said, more softly: "Yeah."

"As it is, you're both alive. I'd say that was a good thing." She rummaged in the greenery, smiled, tossed him a tomato. "Here's to stupid behavior."

* * *

She disliked seeing Kaneda in his office.

Whitby found herself staring at the man's face framed on the screen of the monitor behind Kaneda's desk. Clean, handsome features. Dark, close-cut hair. Eyes that looked trench-black in the lifeless grainy color of the vid feed. Eyes that were intent and warm and flecked with green and gold, to those who'd seen those eyes alive.

She knew that Kaneda had first studied the logs of the _Icarus I_ out of professional obligation. Now, she knew, months of monotony later, they'd become his obsession. She could hear him keep his voice casual: "You knew Captain Pinbacker pretty well, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir."

How he always asked, how she always answered. As always, then, he offered her a blank moment of silence that, as always, she declined to fill. Quite possibly out of simple, automatic politeness, perhaps out of fear of what she would say, he never prompted her.

He switched the recording from "pause" to a black-screened "stop," drew himself straight, and said: "I am putting you on report, Lieutenant Whitby." She left empty the moment he allowed for her reaction; he continued: "You were to proceed to shelter in the Oxygen Garden; you did not. We might have lost both you and Lieutenant Mace, which loss of life could have proved crippling to the mission."

"Mission's undermanned at any rate, sir. Been saying that since _Icarus I_."

"Then you agree you acted unprofessionally."

"Impulsively, maybe." She looked at him coolly. "Unprofessionally, no."

"I am required to allow you to read the report before I file it with Control."

"Thank you, sir: no."

A data pad on his desk. Kaneda turned it her way, handed her a black stylus. Whitby signed the glowing blue signature box and laid the stylus on the desktop.

"Is there anything else, sir?"

A frown troubled his brow without actually settling. Kaneda was kind by nature; she suspected he was enjoying this even less than she was, even with her bruised chest and her cracked ribs and a head full of meds only half doing their job.

"I would like for you to talk to Dr. Searle," he said.

"About--"

The bristling-brusque response would have been "Your attitude." Kaneda was not a bristling man.

"Whatever is troubling you, Loinnir," he said.

* * *

She found Searle in the observation lounge. She never felt entirely safe there. The full-wall view portal went against all her instincts as an astronaut and a diver: it seemed a daft, if not thoroughly dangerous, indulgence on the part of the ship's designers. Had seemed to her, when she took the mission, that someone might have seen fit to wall the thing over, put a proper bulkhead in its place. But no. With a look of polite professionalism masking mildly twitching impatience, Searle turned from from the inferno framed before them. If Whitby wanted nothing more than to be in the blackness of cool deep water, or at least in the quiet dim of her bunk, he wanted to be here.

By the time they were settled in his office, though, he'd found a seemingly genuine and empathetic smile for her. He settled back in the chair behind his desk and asked: "So what are we supposed to talk about?"

Kaneda had been more tactful with her than she was with herself. "My attitude."

He let her talk. But, really, what could she say? That she missed home? Her family? She did; they all did, though; and by now the missing had become even more elemental. "I miss being alive," she said. She caught herself. "No, that's not it. Contact. I miss contact. With the ground, the ocean, the air-- real air, with wind and dust and pollen and smoke and snow in it. With the sky. With--"

She stopped. Amazing how long seconds could seem when they spanned silence. Seemed like a hundred of them had ticked past, when it was probably nearer ten, before Searle prompted: "With--"

"With--" she echoed, softly. _Contact_. Jesus. The meds talking, sure. "Times when he's near me, and I think, Christ, wouldn't it be lovely? Just to hold him, just for a minute--"

"Who?"

"Mace." As if it could have been anyone else. "Who'd-you-think-who?"

He smiled for a moment. Then he said: "It wouldn't be professional, would it?"

"No. It's not that. Think we could handle a tumble without compromising our integrity. It's more--" -- and she paused, tired and aching in her mind as well as her body, and only after a long time did she go on: "It's like a language I don't speak any more. Intimacy. Like a language of hope, isn't it? And I've gone and chucked it away."

Searle asked directly: "Are you suicidal, Loinnir?"

"No." She focused on him, met his dark eyes. "No, I'm not."

"Because suicide is a mortal sin, and you wouldn't get to heaven."

"No." Whitby dug behind her wall of meds and offered Searle a droll smile. "Mostly because I'd be dead. Couldn't bloody well complete the mission then, could I?"

* * *

He was at the door to her quarters just past twenty-one hundred hours. She answered his knock dressed in sweatpants and a charcoal-gray sweatshirt-- or two: she still looked cold. She looked tired, too; her north-sea eyes were slightly dull.

"We could do this tomorrow," Mace said.

"No." Whitby pushed her palms along her temples, as though she were pulling sleep from her eyebrows. "Just not here."

They went to the common area off the galley. Whitby winced as she seated herself at the table. Mace sat opposite her.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm not in the best shape."

"You still hurt."

"Yeah." She hesitated, then said to the tabletop: "Kaneda put me on report."

"For--"

"For saving you." She looked at him. "You'll agree: he's right."

"Yeah."

"I acted unprofessionally. You'll agree with that, too."

"No. I won't." Mace tapped fingertips in a light circle on the table. "I need to say two things. The first is 'thank you.' The second is 'I'm sorry.' I shouldn't have said-- you know: what I said in the hall."

"I shouldn't be rising to taunts, myself."

They sat for a time after that, nothing between them but the steel tabletop and quiet and the thrum of the ship. Then she looked over at him, cocked her head thoughtfully, sleepily. "Think this is where we're supposed to decide."

"Decide what?"

"Your place or mine."

For a moment, it wasn't a joke. He remembered her smile outside the freezer, and suddenly, just for a second, things, everything, seemed brighter, more focused.

He said, gently: "Think you need your sleep."

Whitby nodded. "I do." She got up stiffly, came around the table en route to the door, patted his shoulder. "G'night, tool."

Mace smiled. "See you tomorrow, Pilot."

* * *

He hadn't returned immediately to the observation lounge after Whitby left. Searle sat in Medical with the exaggerated calm of an addict denying the need for a drink, a hit, or a cigarette and filled out the remainder of her psych report. Then he strolled back to the lounge, stopping at the galley for a bottle of water, casually, as though he cared as little for the thing beyond the lounge portal as it cared for him. Mace was there, at the table, spearing at a salad with a fork.

Searle said, smiling: "Gonna be seeing plenty more of that, now that you and Whitby went and torched that meat store."

"What can I say?" Mace actually smiled back. Rare, and good, to see him relaxed. "We felt like a barbecue."

Searle was at the door with his water. "As long as it wasn't you on the menu, right?"

"Hell, if we come up short on burgers, we can always cook Trey," Mace said, as Searle went out into the corridor.

Two jokes in under a minute, and the first he'd heard from Mace in over a month. Maybe Whitby had passed him a few of her pain pills. Searle chuckled. "Sure. Goodnight, Mace."

"Goodnight, Searle."

* * *

He didn't mind being their confessor: after all, he was their doctor and psychologist; moreover, as he suspected was the case with most humans, not just those he would classify as listening professionals, he got a visceral thrill from the blending of secrets and trust.

Searle stood nearly at the filtered reinforced glass of the lounge's viewing wall and looked out at _it_. Orange and white and yellow roilings, red upheavals, scars in burgundy churning up, churning under. Window-filling now: the last slivers of black space had vanished from the far edges of the glass weeks ago.

Whitby, their good Catholic (truly odd, wasn't it, to know that such creatures still existed?), had asked him, months back: "Who's _your_ confessor, Searle?"

He'd smiled and lied: "I send my thoughts in my messages to Control."

All of them came to him, regularly (like Trey and Harvey), or sporadically (here you'd find Corazon and Kaneda), or nearly not at all (Capa, Mace, and Whitby were the team's holdouts), with what he thought of as their "miss-lists." Tonight Whitby had left something off of hers.

It was his fault. He knew that. Some weeks back-- it was months now, wasn't it?-- she'd sat in the chair across from his at his desk and, scowling back tears, had told him how much she missed her son.

He said, without thinking-- he as much as blurted it: "_Your_ sun?"

She'd looked a little confused, then more than a little suspicious. She had eyes as deeply blue as the North Atlantic, and just as cold. "Yeah. My boy." And she hadn't mentioned him since. Not to Searle, at any rate.

Here and now, Searle drew a deep breath and pressed his palm to the window of the observation lounge. Blistering heat: no. The glass was dry and cool. He focused on his confessor and breathed out.

_My_ sun.

He stood there, looking. He told himself, still, sometimes, that he was looking for something he could actually _see_. Mercury, for instance. Those on the flight deck, Trey and Whitby and Mace with their enhanced views forward, were already on the lookout. The Messenger would be visible to all of them in less than two months.

It would be good for them, wouldn't it?

Something new. Something to break the tedium. Something to shake the stress from the final stages of the mission.

Searle smiled out at his sun. It'd be good. Sure.

**THE END**

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End file.
